201–210 of 329 posts
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Pay in Germany is generally low. Where someone in Seattle would earn $120k to $140k easily, the same person in Germany may net only $40k to $50k. Housing and especially food & drink are much cheaper than the US though, $12 beers aren't anywhere near as common.
I'm from Germany, so yeah, you are right, but if he makes less than half of the numbers above (80k-100k) he is still underpaid.
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I'm not talking about working conditions. I'm referring to employment. We need less people to do stuff. Thousands of years ago everyone was involved in subsistance. Pretty soon we developed technologies (the wheel, the plow) that meant we needed fewer people to do that. So people were able to move on to doing other things (like making pots or clothing). Pretty soon we automated those things as well (potters wheel, th…
> We need less people to do stuff. A thousand years ago there were 400 million people on earth. Today there are 764 million jobs in China alone. So, on a literal basis at least, that's not turning out to be true so far. Your supposition is that this time it's different than all the other times people have claimed that automation and technology will make everyone idle. But maybe it's not different this time. Maybe tec…
There may be 764 million jobs in China, but it's almost certain that those workers are doing more than just double the work of the 400 million people from 1000 years ago (as measured by output).
Many of the Beautiful Machines science fiction from the 60's promised now exist, but not for you or me. We never stopped to think who these things would actually belong to and who would benefit. The 'liberation' of business that replaced the controls put in place before has brought us to a place where corporate feudalist rules supreme. Those that defend capitalism and democracy frequently confuse the one with the oth…
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Pay in Germany is generally low. Where someone in Seattle would earn $120k to $140k easily, the same person in Germany may net only $40k to $50k. Housing and especially food & drink are much cheaper than the US though, $12 beers aren't anywhere near as common.
I'm from Germany, so yeah, you are right, but if he makes less than half of the numbers above (80k-100k) he is still underpaid.
The article doesn't support its conclusion that drug addiction is caused by people's dim prospects. The man in this article was already an addict before he was old enough to have any perspective on his future potential. I think the deeper problem is that kids are not inspired to gain their own ambitions. So many people walk through life with no ambitions beyond what they plan on doing next weekend. I think a huge iss…
Source: https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/drugs-despair-and-trump-1c6...
I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…
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Its the power of capital over labor, whereby capital is extremely stratified in the hands of very few people, and they have shifted political power so as to avoid investment in the laborers (aka everyone below themselves) and ensure they do not become a threat. Additionally, they will usually influence monetary policy to ensure their status is never challenged, which is why rapidly rising housing prices aren't a majo…
Within capitalism itself, some economists also argue that wealth concentration tends to suppress investment opportunities, because there aren't as many "moneyed eyes" on economic events worthy of capital and management; investment gets tunnel vision. I don't have any links on-hand but there's plenty of material out there (from reputable sources, and not-so-reputable ones) with a quick Google search. https://www.googl…
Another arguing point for when I get into it with the "what's wrong with income inequality" folks here. :)
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Maybe learning a craft could work for him? Woodworking, metalworking, glass-blowing, programming? An apprenticeship might just be right up his alley, but I'm not sure how available that is in the US.
For plumbers, electricians and a few other trades you can become a journeyman apprentice in the US, and after a few years you can earn high 5 digits to low 6 digits with healthcare usually. That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.
I have no idea how we got to this point. It's even more absurd because you call these people because you didn't know how, didn't want to learn, or didn't want to do a job _yourself_.
It's absurd; I honestly feel guilty about being a software engineer with a cushy job making high-end of average for the area when I feel like I do nothing at all. I type some stuff, other people are happy, I get money. I get it, it took a lot of time to figure out what to type in the best way, but it took the electrician I hired to rewire my house a while to learn the regs and best practices, and after spending 5 minutes in my attic in the summer did not envy his job of running cable up to it and then out to all the rooms upstairs, whereas I just sit on a porch swing or at my desk or on my couch while I work.
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I'm black, and a small part of me is enraged when I read these kinds of articles. This kind of sh*t has been happening in the Black community for GENERATIONS. No one cares until it's white people though. That said, maybe once people see that this sort of despair is beginning to affect white people, they will gain more empathy for all the black people suffering the same way.
I would like to think so but the political direction that a suffering white middle class is taking us I'm afraid will not improve things for everyone equally. Growing up in the rural south I have heard literally my entire life how most of our problems are caused by government greed and immigrant, not massive wealth inequality. At the same time on NPR you might hear about the terrible working conditions immigrants dea…
This is everyone's problem and the solution needs to be for all Americans not just ones who live in a select region or have higher amounts of melanin
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Educate them with all of the free time created from automation, then put them back in to the work force.
you can educate people as much as you want, the majority aren't going to be able to become engineers and physicists. Unless we can get to the point where we can manipulate genes to increase intelligence that's not a solution to the problem
As the high school coach used to say: "You don't need talent to practice!"
Barring people truly born with mental disabilities, anyone can do it with the right attitude and resources. I'd be less worried about the gene pool and more worried about the unequal distribution of education spending causing pockets of the country to be financially unable to educate people.